Various practices, usually very complicated and cumbersome, have been devised to prepare inorganic hollow nanostructures. Some of these very small particles have been of interest owing to a wide variety of applications in optical, electronic, magnetic, catalytic, and sensing devices ranging from photonic crystals to drug-delivery carriers. There remains a need for a relatively simple method of preparing metal-carbon composites and metal alloy-carbon composite materials in the form of porous, hollow, spherical nanostructures.